Unlock the Power of Bash in Jupyter Notebooks

Bash Kernel: Unlock the Power of Bash in Jupyter Notebooks

Are you a developer or data scientist looking to enhance your Jupyter Notebook experience with the power of Bash? Look no further than the Bash kernel! In this article, we will explore the Bash kernel’s features and functionalities, its installation process, and how to display rich content in Jupyter Notebooks using Bash commands and scripts.

Installation

To get started with the Bash kernel, you’ll need to have IPython 3 installed. Once you have IPython 3, you can install the Bash kernel by running the following commands:

shell
pip install bash_kernel
python -m bash_kernel.install

With the Bash kernel installed, you’ll have access to the Bash option in the ‘New’ menu of the Jupyter Notebook interface. You can also use the Bash kernel in other interfaces, such as the Qt console or the Jupyter console.

Displaying Rich Content

The Bash kernel allows you to display specialized content, such as images, HTML, and JavaScript, directly in your Jupyter Notebooks. By using the display, displayHTML, and displayJS functions, you can easily incorporate rich content into your notebooks. For example, you can display an image by piping it into the display function:

shell
cat dog.png | display

To display HTML or JavaScript content, you can use the displayHTML and displayJS functions respectively:

shell
echo "<b>Dog</b>, not a cat." | displayHTML
echo "alert('It is known khaleesi!');" | displayJS

Updating Rich Content Cells

If you need to update the content of a rich content cell dynamically, you can use a unique display_id. By specifying a display_id, you can replace the content of the cell with a new value. For example, you can update an HTML cell every second with a different number:

shell
display_id="id_${RANDOM}"
((ii=0))
while ((ii < 10)); do
echo "<div>${ii}</div>" | displayHTML $display_id
((ii = ii+1))
sleep 1
done

This also works for images and JavaScript content.

Programmatically Generating Rich Content

Alternatively, you can programmatically generate rich content by outputting it to a file in the /tmp directory or the $TMPDIR environment variable. Once you have generated the content, you can output the corresponding context prefix “TEXT_SAVED*”. This allows you to write programs in languages like C++, Go, or Rust that generate rich content within a notebook environment.

The environment variable NOTEBOOK_BASH_KERNEL_CAPABILITIES will be set with a comma-separated list of the supported types, such as “image,html,javascript”, which your program can check for.

To output to a specific display_id and enable content updates, prefix the filename with the display_id. For example, to display the contents of /tmp/myHTML.html with a display id of “id_12345”, you can use the following command:

shell
bash_kernel: saved html data to: (id_12345) /tmp/myHTML.html

More Information

For more information on how the Bash kernel works and its integration with Jupyter, you can check out the Jupyter docs on wrapper kernels and the Pexpect docs on the replwrap module.

Start leveraging the power of Bash in Jupyter Notebooks today with the Bash kernel! Run shell commands, execute shell scripts, and display rich content seamlessly in your notebooks. Whether you are a developer, data scientist, or system administrator, the Bash kernel brings the versatility of Bash into your Jupyter Notebook environment.